I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
Even cops that are well intended, that most people would call good, are hopelessly under trained regarding civil rights. A lot of have them have delusions of being some kind of detective and being clever about deceiving you into giving up your rights. Then they become belligerent if you don't play along.
In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."
Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
> Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people. I’m not against transparency and reform, I’m saying these poor communities need more good policing not less.
> You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people.
That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.
Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).
The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.
Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".
Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.
They have suffered from abuse because of unregulated police. They have not suffered because of police simpliciter.
Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.
Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.
And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.
The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
The poorest communities are the punching bags for police. It is the wealthy communities that don't care because they have money for lawyers to make charges disappear and connections to make cops play nice in their communities, poor people with public defenders don't and cops and courts know it and use them as easy funding/extortion.
Overpolicing is the term used by one side that claims that any disparities in crime rates along demographic lines are due to an excess of police activity rather than any other factors.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
i.e. if some crazy, cartoon villain scientist were to create the perfect tool to enable fishing for crimes, the Flock cameras and drones would be the first.
Even Sim City implemented this concept decades ago. If you overfunded the police, you would get "complaints" about tickets for jaywalking and lose approval.
Thank you. Then he and I are probably in agreement, and my choice of words was incorrect. Illegal searches/stalking is a subset of the harmful actions I had in mind.
> Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people. Budgets are laws.
> The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress
Execution will never be as simple as the textual content of a bill, so I'm not sure 'mindless' is a useful term.
While the POTUS is expected to be a bureaucrat, functionally and conceptually that is only one aspect of their responsibilities. Military oversight and diplomatic coordination as head of state, comes to mind.
I'm oversimplifying, but when it comes to the budget I'm pretty accurate: the president can't just decide they won't spend the money because they don't like where it's going or who it's going to. They certainly can't extort the lawful recipients of the money.
If you feel there should be cuts to nsf, then congress should do so (as enshrined by law). Not executive fiat by the president. Per the constitution the congress has the power of the purse.
My understanding is that congress chooses how much money should be distributed to each organization (e.g. NSF) each year, and preventing that money from being distributed is not legal. If I understand correctly, your table is of appropriation from Congress, not distribution[1]. I am open to being corrected if I am wrong.
Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
UK police officers are not routinely armed, but there armed response units, and under certain circumstances in e.g. railway stations and airports you will see pairs of officers walking about with machine guns on a regular basis.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked. The link below will give you an idea of the volume of formal complaints and the 'pipeline' from complaint to potential dismissal and criminal proceedings against officers;
The next step would be blunt "fuck you and your constitutions and amendments, we're in charge here, we own the guns (both police and army), the media, the businesses, and we won't go away peacefully regardless of your elections". It is already happening here in Serbia which used to be a civilized country.
There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
Because the cops that did this won't face any real consequences. Will they be fired? Maybe. But will they stop being cops? Almost certainly not. Will they face criminal or civil penalties? Almost certainly not. Will they keep all benefits related to being a cop? Yes.
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out? What do you think it should be? Post a compelling TikTok and put the bad cop in jail? This is due process.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
Because these lawsuits all play out the same. The city pays out, the cop is maybe fired and they go get a job in the next city over as a cop.
> What do you think it should be?
At a minimum every cop involved should lose the right or ability to be a cop anywhere.
> I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power.
I think cops are necessary, I wouldn't call them good. I don't think we have reasonable guards because cops abuse their power all the time and face few consequences. More than a few cops have gotten away with murder.
> And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
The remedy is that the city pays, not the cops. That's not accountability. The city doesn't even have to fire the cop, just pay out.
> Of course lawsuits solve a problem. Reduce the incentive to do it. Remove the bad actors.
No they don’t. This is an ignorant statement to make knowing the history of lawsuits against police and how little to no effect that’s had on police abuse of power.
It’s just like gambling: who gives a shit if you’re playing with someone else’s money.
Who pays for the lawsuit? When do cops actually have skin in the game?
Qualified immunity is a joke. They have absolute immunity with the exception of when it is too politically hot and the cops were stupid enough to leave a trail that worked to convict them.
Policing in America is effectively a state-sanctioned mob. I get the need for the law to have teeth in its enforcement, but when the law doesn't apply to those that enforce it then the system is inherently broken.
Until this current regime, my assumption was a simple hierarchy of oversight up to the federal level but the current regime itself has no oversight and is absolutely fine with the system as it is.
1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
Try FOIAing a body cam, and filing a complaint. You might get action before the next Ice Age. Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor. In practice there's no accountability.
This guy seemed to do it. I also have better things to do than record police and refuse instructions.
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
What dog? There was no dog involved in the article or preceding conments. You seem to have a problem with reading comprehension and/or are suffering from some kind of delusion.
I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.
There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.
I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."
Not enough people blame VCs and the people that fund evil things. They are accessories. They knew this would happen, let's not pretend they didn't.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
Sooo many will tout something along "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to explain why evil must happen. Just search for it in comments here on HN, and you will see it again and again, as if everyone's hands are twisted.
Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity
You are confused. Yes, lots of people say that here, but the intention is almost never to justify immoral behavior. Rather the goal is to delegitimize capitalism by blaming it for the immoral behavior.
They are the reason these companies exist. When it comes to the creation of large for-profit technology companies, they decide what comes about and what doesn't. The blame is on them.
They also fit startup logic in a peculiarly perverted way: try all the nasty stuff compartmentalized into a low stakes stealth mode start up, then become an acquisition target once you've got the perverted PMF of having a benign looking product that hides the evil within. Clean hands for the acquirer.
They are more than a accessory. You wouldn't say someone who funds a contract killing is merely an accessory to murder. VCs should likewise be considered as principal offenders, unless there is proof that the company was not transparent with the VCs.
They're more than accessories, that nearly writes them off as being innocent looped-in bystanders. Y Combinator has a vested stake, they want to encourage a maximalist Flock-centric police force. They directly profit off police that are incapable of doing their job without extreme, abusive tools at their disposal.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
The law is properly a limit on behavior, not a grant for acceptable behavior. It defines in which situations the state will ultimately employ its monopoly on violence to compel compliance.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
Don’t know why you’re downvoted but this venture funding is exactly what makes the scale and centralization of surveillance possible. You can’t build this sort of system out without the debt financing provided by the vc industry.
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
Its a camera bro, reading the same license plates your can read with your eyes. If you care about your precincts policies go take it up with them. You may as well go after companies selling firearms to police.
There is a massive difference between a human making observations and 120,000 cameras (at last count) coordinated through a single company's computer systems. This surveillance state enablement is as anti-American as it gets.
They take pictures of cars in certain intersections and register their license plates and keep them between 0 and 30 days typically (usually 7). It can be queried and logged. So if someone gets kidnapped and they're looking for someone its easy to track them.
There have been 1m “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10k missing persons. If you don't believe that look at a few real cases. Every example of a bad case is basically cops keeping tabs on ex-girlfiends or wives. Yes, that's bad but I prefer to save kids from kidnapping.
Saying its "anti-American" isn't an argument. I think it's very pro-American in that it protects law abiding Americans from criminals.
200k kids are kidnapped each year (overwhelmingly by family) but hey they stopped a small percentage so we should all give up our rights to the government. You’re a fool.
You certainly do. If you're not willing to wear a camera and microphone 24/7 for the good of the police, then you're helping the kidnappers hide their crimes and legitimize their privacy.
This is why the human life arithmetic has to be dropped if you want to genuinely steelman your point, it's a tortured statistic that we can use to justify any number of outlawed practices. If you can defend your point sincerely without the use of hysteric examples, then please walk us through the logic and authority that convinces you Flock is good. If you can't, then I'm going to have to agree with the people dogpiling on you, this is a ridiculous opinion.
Why hold back? Clearly we should install live-feed cameras in every home so we can solve most domestic crimes; surely a little police abuse shouldn't prevent such a profound reduction of crime. It's not like any of these people have rights or anything like that. /s
Agreed. Which is why I’m in favor of recording all conversations within earshot of any public location. Those can be tagged for keywords related to child endangerment. After all, who would argue against protecting kids?
In fact, we should take the pictures from public school districts and feed them into this system. Facial recognition immediately available on any kid that happens to walk on any public street. Why would anyone want to opt out of such a system?
Or how about we have a license plate camera in some intersections, that records license plates that can be queried by police officer to try to find perpetrators of crime. Pretty much the same thing right?
When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this.
"Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
Broadly speaking, you will only rarely find police properly prosecuted for their misdeeds. Usually, the worst that happens is dismissal, if even that. Of course there are outliers - cops who wrongly kill people have been prosecuted from time to time, but even then, their chances of escaping justice are higher than for an individual citizen in their place.
There are many reasons for this, but in my humble opinion, the worst one is the "thin blue line" - the idea that police are a brotherhood holding back the darkness of crime and evil, which leads to the idea that their misdeeds are somehow excusable by people "on their team", which includes other cops and citizens who are aligned with them.
In my opinion, police should be held to a higher standard by society to match the higher level of trust, protection, and presumption of regularity that we give them. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted even more zealously and reliably than laypeople, rather than only rarely.
Prosecutors are insufficiently independent from cops. The job of prosecutor is often as political steppingstone. Prosecuting cops isn't compatible with that.
sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
> we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
Sorry, but as we are a nation incapable of moderating its emotions in favor of higher thought, your only policy choices are “back the blue under any circumstances” or “defund the police and empty the jails”.
You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.
> Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.
If abuse can’t be eliminated then it’s about what ratio of abuse to crime reduction is tolerable I guess. If we find 100 taken children while a dirty cop stalks his ex - is that tolerable? I’d say yes. If it became more abused I guess that’s when society needs to decide.
Abuse can be eliminated. It's called requiring a warrant. What's tolerable doesn't matter: we don't need to litigate how willing we are to bend the fourth amendment.
If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)
I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable
I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.
We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.
Video is useful in keeping people safe. Including from the cops. It’s about remaking the system to require court permission every time they access it, process and transparency.
Hmm, I wonder if, as a plaintiff that wished to file a complaint against a police department, would the records be gone by the time I got far enough through the courts to force evidence discovery. All of the Flock-lovers I talk to love to bring up the short-lived nature of the data (7 or 30 days depending on who you talk to).
This. I don't understand why something can only be used in the wrong way. Either
A. there is nothing a good person needs to hide (including cops, at least good ones), therefore it should be openly public to everyone and all usage logged and public (to catch abuse), or
B. privacy is important so it should be protected, and while data is collectible, nonetheless cannot be shared without consent or a court order. And none of this fake content that companies claim you gave by walking outside, setting up your phone/account/etc after buying it and being forced to sign so you didn't just buy an expensive brick, etc.
No big deal is it was just video. It's really about the data that can be extracted from the video such as who you meet, when you are home or not and who is at your house, etc. all in realtime.
You are conflating extremely different things, and that is dangerous.
Somehow we went from:
1. People can see and hear your in public
2. Therefore public places are not private
3. Therefore people can record you
4. Therefore it's okay to build a network of cameras that can track and query every place you have ever been
The problem has always been on step 2. The assumption that "public places are not private" anymore just because everyone can record you and post it on TikTok. In reality before smartphones public places were extremely private compared to being broadcast to the entire planet.
Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
Should we also have separate posts for every individual case when camera helped catch someone? What's the point of continuously posting what amounts to single anecdotes without any statistical context? Should we ban every technology and shut down any government program that has small amount, but rage-bait-able form of, abuse?
Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes.
“Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet.
There is a lot of widely available evidence
If only there was a more general way to find the lying sneaking power tripping police officers. Flock is turning out to be quite useful for society, in this one very specific way. Data to watch the watchmen.
Why not the other way around? First make sure the police department is capable of using them legally and reliably investigating abuse, then we can consider allowing them.
Don't remove freedom from society - Be kind to people and give them equal opportunities to make sure they use their freedom for good. Prosecute bad apples with actual police work and don't let them ruin a good thing.
Absolutely. First let's install an extreme surveillance state and give them full police power unlimited by the Constitution. Then, later, if we have any regrets, no problem. Just restore democracy.
But we decided as a country long long long ago that we wouldn't abet abuse, unwarranted search and seizure, and would treat people as innocent until proven guilty even if that meant elevated crime was the price to pay for that
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense
Remind them that whether they're doing something wrong or not is not their call. That sometimes shows signs of sinking in.
A bad cop can sell your location so they can rob your house when you are out or tell the bad guys how to find you
Agreed. I mean, there's really no shortage of terrible scenarios that can happen if we cannot assume that 100% of cops are good.
Even cops that are well intended, that most people would call good, are hopelessly under trained regarding civil rights. A lot of have them have delusions of being some kind of detective and being clever about deceiving you into giving up your rights. Then they become belligerent if you don't play along.
In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."
Leopards, faces, and all that jazz.
Calling fishing for vengance "overpolicing", that says a lot.
Appologies, but I don't know what you mean.
Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
> Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
The origin of many (or most) of the first organized police forces in the US were to control slaves and catch runaways.
The police have always been oriented towards protecting the wealthy from the poor.
You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people. I’m not against transparency and reform, I’m saying these poor communities need more good policing not less.
> You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people.
That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.
Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).
The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.
Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".
Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.
They are saying that the problem isn't the quantity of policing but the quality.
The poorest communities need good policing the most, and suffer from bad policing the most. Both things are true at the same time.
They have suffered from abuse because of unregulated police. They have not suffered because of police simpliciter.
Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.
Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.
And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.
The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
The poorest communities are the punching bags for police. It is the wealthy communities that don't care because they have money for lawyers to make charges disappear and connections to make cops play nice in their communities, poor people with public defenders don't and cops and courts know it and use them as easy funding/extortion.
Associating the term policing with legitimacy is not something every person defaults to
Overpolicing is the term used by one side that claims that any disparities in crime rates along demographic lines are due to an excess of police activity rather than any other factors.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
By "over-policing" I meant something like "fishing for a crime."
i.e. if some crazy, cartoon villain scientist were to create the perfect tool to enable fishing for crimes, the Flock cameras and drones would be the first.
Even Sim City implemented this concept decades ago. If you overfunded the police, you would get "complaints" about tickets for jaywalking and lose approval.
It’s a tweet from 10ish years ago
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party
IIRC originally posted in reference to anti-trans women who voted Republican and were shocked to find out that women’s rights weren’t a priority
I think he's saying fishing for evidence is not "policing", since fishing for evidence is illegal, and therefore not within the bounds of the job.
Thank you. Then he and I are probably in agreement, and my choice of words was incorrect. Illegal searches/stalking is a subset of the harmful actions I had in mind.
Its a fair bit more than overpolicing. If you don't think it is hope that boot is tasty.
> Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
| FY | NSF appropriation |
| 1952 | $4M |
| 1960 | $153M |
| 1970 | $440M |
| 1980 | $992M |
| 1990 | $2.08B |
| 2000 | $3.91B |
| 2010 | $6.87B |
| 2020 | $8.21B |
| 2024 | $9.06B |
| 2025 | $9.06B |
| 2026 | $8.75B |
> How is a cut illegal?
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people. Budgets are laws.
> The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress
Execution will never be as simple as the textual content of a bill, so I'm not sure 'mindless' is a useful term.
While the POTUS is expected to be a bureaucrat, functionally and conceptually that is only one aspect of their responsibilities. Military oversight and diplomatic coordination as head of state, comes to mind.
I'm oversimplifying, but when it comes to the budget I'm pretty accurate: the president can't just decide they won't spend the money because they don't like where it's going or who it's going to. They certainly can't extort the lawful recipients of the money.
If you feel there should be cuts to nsf, then congress should do so (as enshrined by law). Not executive fiat by the president. Per the constitution the congress has the power of the purse.
Government funding must be approved by Congress. If Congress already approved funding the NSF, then it has to be Congress that removes the funding.
My understanding is that congress chooses how much money should be distributed to each organization (e.g. NSF) each year, and preventing that money from being distributed is not legal. If I understand correctly, your table is of appropriation from Congress, not distribution[1]. I am open to being corrected if I am wrong.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6
Cuts must come from congress. Read Constitution.
The cuts can be illegal if one doesn’t have the authority to cut it and/or violates the procedures required.
Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
UK police officers are not routinely armed, but there armed response units, and under certain circumstances in e.g. railway stations and airports you will see pairs of officers walking about with machine guns on a regular basis.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked. The link below will give you an idea of the volume of formal complaints and the 'pipeline' from complaint to potential dismissal and criminal proceedings against officers;
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-misconduct-e...
The accountability system is 'under review' (we do this a lot, slows things down nicely and looks like action);
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-review...
It isn't unicorns and rainbows by any means;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66809642
The next step would be blunt "fuck you and your constitutions and amendments, we're in charge here, we own the guns (both police and army), the media, the businesses, and we won't go away peacefully regardless of your elections". It is already happening here in Serbia which used to be a civilized country.
Seems clear that's begun in the US now.
Most people don’t realize that yet here in America. The fascists are still in our OODA loop.
There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
Because the cops that did this won't face any real consequences. Will they be fired? Maybe. But will they stop being cops? Almost certainly not. Will they face criminal or civil penalties? Almost certainly not. Will they keep all benefits related to being a cop? Yes.
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out? What do you think it should be? Post a compelling TikTok and put the bad cop in jail? This is due process.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
> Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out?
Because these lawsuits all play out the same. The city pays out, the cop is maybe fired and they go get a job in the next city over as a cop.
> What do you think it should be?
At a minimum every cop involved should lose the right or ability to be a cop anywhere.
> I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power.
I think cops are necessary, I wouldn't call them good. I don't think we have reasonable guards because cops abuse their power all the time and face few consequences. More than a few cops have gotten away with murder.
> And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
The remedy is that the city pays, not the cops. That's not accountability. The city doesn't even have to fire the cop, just pay out.
A lawsuit does not solve a systemic problem. This is not a "a few people abuse a tool" situation.
People suck. The tool shouldn't exist.
I genuinely do not understand the boot-licking. Bizarre. It show's a complete and utter lack of foresight.
Of course lawsuits solve a problem. Reduce the incentive to do it. Remove the bad actors.
The tool absolutely should exist. It has literally helped solve 10k kidnappings. Here are a few examples:
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-police-woman-charged-w...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/galt-flock-kidnappin...
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/kidnapping-investigation-l...
"Kidnappings", such as someone being a few hours late on exchanging custody of the kids with zero danger to them.
> Of course lawsuits solve a problem. Reduce the incentive to do it. Remove the bad actors.
No they don’t. This is an ignorant statement to make knowing the history of lawsuits against police and how little to no effect that’s had on police abuse of power.
It’s just like gambling: who gives a shit if you’re playing with someone else’s money.
The cops used this 100 times over this one person. Will they be punished no?
Has someone checked if they didnt abuse their power over 100 other people? Very likely no.
Who pays for the lawsuit? When do cops actually have skin in the game?
Qualified immunity is a joke. They have absolute immunity with the exception of when it is too politically hot and the cops were stupid enough to leave a trail that worked to convict them.
Policing in America is effectively a state-sanctioned mob. I get the need for the law to have teeth in its enforcement, but when the law doesn't apply to those that enforce it then the system is inherently broken.
Until this current regime, my assumption was a simple hierarchy of oversight up to the federal level but the current regime itself has no oversight and is absolutely fine with the system as it is.
You are one of those people who will never learn unless this abuse happens to you.
1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
Same thing with FISA abuse. Nothing materially changes
Try FOIAing a body cam, and filing a complaint. You might get action before the next Ice Age. Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor. In practice there's no accountability.
This guy seemed to do it. I also have better things to do than record police and refuse instructions.
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
An out of county police officer, in general, can't conduct a traffic stop? There's a few exceptions but none of those seem to apply?
It doesn't hold up? What the implication, then? That the recording was illegal and the post-arrest investigation yielded the wrong result?
> Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
Can you cite the law that requires more than “it doesn’t sit right” to record police officers in public?
He didn't foia anything. The article is about discovery in a lawsuit.
To quote your other post... where you wrote: "Its a camera bro"
Why citizens cannot record cops?
What dog? There was no dog involved in the article or preceding conments. You seem to have a problem with reading comprehension and/or are suffering from some kind of delusion.
I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.
Flock also has the advantage of scale and centralization where previous solutions had neither
There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.
> How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.
The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.
I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."
Not enough people blame VCs and the people that fund evil things. They are accessories. They knew this would happen, let's not pretend they didn't.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
Sooo many will tout something along "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to explain why evil must happen. Just search for it in comments here on HN, and you will see it again and again, as if everyone's hands are twisted.
Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity
You are confused. Yes, lots of people say that here, but the intention is almost never to justify immoral behavior. Rather the goal is to delegitimize capitalism by blaming it for the immoral behavior.
No, the parent is exactly right. I've seen it countless times and I am so sick of it. The poor, poor CEO has to be evil, it is his duty.
They are the reason these companies exist. When it comes to the creation of large for-profit technology companies, they decide what comes about and what doesn't. The blame is on them.
They also fit startup logic in a peculiarly perverted way: try all the nasty stuff compartmentalized into a low stakes stealth mode start up, then become an acquisition target once you've got the perverted PMF of having a benign looking product that hides the evil within. Clean hands for the acquirer.
They are more than a accessory. You wouldn't say someone who funds a contract killing is merely an accessory to murder. VCs should likewise be considered as principal offenders, unless there is proof that the company was not transparent with the VCs.
They're more than accessories, that nearly writes them off as being innocent looped-in bystanders. Y Combinator has a vested stake, they want to encourage a maximalist Flock-centric police force. They directly profit off police that are incapable of doing their job without extreme, abusive tools at their disposal.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
Blaming people trying to make money is so pointless. Change the law if you don't like what is happening.
The law is properly a limit on behavior, not a grant for acceptable behavior. It defines in which situations the state will ultimately employ its monopoly on violence to compel compliance.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
You're right. People trying to make money should be held legally accountable for the impact of their investments.
> Change the law
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
Don’t know why you’re downvoted but this venture funding is exactly what makes the scale and centralization of surveillance possible. You can’t build this sort of system out without the debt financing provided by the vc industry.
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
Its a camera bro, reading the same license plates your can read with your eyes. If you care about your precincts policies go take it up with them. You may as well go after companies selling firearms to police.
There is a massive difference between a human making observations and 120,000 cameras (at last count) coordinated through a single company's computer systems. This surveillance state enablement is as anti-American as it gets.
They take pictures of cars in certain intersections and register their license plates and keep them between 0 and 30 days typically (usually 7). It can be queried and logged. So if someone gets kidnapped and they're looking for someone its easy to track them.
There have been 1m “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10k missing persons. If you don't believe that look at a few real cases. Every example of a bad case is basically cops keeping tabs on ex-girlfiends or wives. Yes, that's bad but I prefer to save kids from kidnapping.
Saying its "anti-American" isn't an argument. I think it's very pro-American in that it protects law abiding Americans from criminals.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/how-effective-is-flock
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-police-woman-charged-w...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/galt-flock-kidnappin...
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/mitchell-weber-arrest-...
200k kids are kidnapped each year (overwhelmingly by family) but hey they stopped a small percentage so we should all give up our rights to the government. You’re a fool.
I agree, we should let "a small percentage" of 200k kidnapped kids go missing because a police officer might track his ex-wife during a 7 day window.
You certainly do. If you're not willing to wear a camera and microphone 24/7 for the good of the police, then you're helping the kidnappers hide their crimes and legitimize their privacy.
This is why the human life arithmetic has to be dropped if you want to genuinely steelman your point, it's a tortured statistic that we can use to justify any number of outlawed practices. If you can defend your point sincerely without the use of hysteric examples, then please walk us through the logic and authority that convinces you Flock is good. If you can't, then I'm going to have to agree with the people dogpiling on you, this is a ridiculous opinion.
Why hold back? Clearly we should install live-feed cameras in every home so we can solve most domestic crimes; surely a little police abuse shouldn't prevent such a profound reduction of crime. It's not like any of these people have rights or anything like that. /s
Agreed. Which is why I’m in favor of recording all conversations within earshot of any public location. Those can be tagged for keywords related to child endangerment. After all, who would argue against protecting kids?
In fact, we should take the pictures from public school districts and feed them into this system. Facial recognition immediately available on any kid that happens to walk on any public street. Why would anyone want to opt out of such a system?
(/s if it isn’t obvious)
Or how about we have a license plate camera in some intersections, that records license plates that can be queried by police officer to try to find perpetrators of crime. Pretty much the same thing right?
When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...
How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this. "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
so it was a department wide surveillance. almost like officers choose to engage in illegal behavior constantly to support each other.
This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
We have a way. Diligently prosecute the offender. Unclear why it's not used here.
Broadly speaking, you will only rarely find police properly prosecuted for their misdeeds. Usually, the worst that happens is dismissal, if even that. Of course there are outliers - cops who wrongly kill people have been prosecuted from time to time, but even then, their chances of escaping justice are higher than for an individual citizen in their place.
There are many reasons for this, but in my humble opinion, the worst one is the "thin blue line" - the idea that police are a brotherhood holding back the darkness of crime and evil, which leads to the idea that their misdeeds are somehow excusable by people "on their team", which includes other cops and citizens who are aligned with them.
In my opinion, police should be held to a higher standard by society to match the higher level of trust, protection, and presumption of regularity that we give them. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted even more zealously and reliably than laypeople, rather than only rarely.
Prosecutors are insufficiently independent from cops. The job of prosecutor is often as political steppingstone. Prosecuting cops isn't compatible with that.
sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
> we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
Sorry, but as we are a nation incapable of moderating its emotions in favor of higher thought, your only policy choices are “back the blue under any circumstances” or “defund the police and empty the jails”.
Pretty cut and dried civil liberties case there
I'm glad this guy will get his payout, but infuriated that the perpetrators will likely face no consequences, and the burden will fall on the public.
Infuriating, yes, but apparently getting shot for no reason is also quite popular. This sounds like the better deal.
Nobody offers you such deal. You get both.
https://flockonyourblock.com/
Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.
Using minority report as an example of a good policing system is a bit unsettling.
> Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.
If abuse can’t be eliminated then it’s about what ratio of abuse to crime reduction is tolerable I guess. If we find 100 taken children while a dirty cop stalks his ex - is that tolerable? I’d say yes. If it became more abused I guess that’s when society needs to decide.
Abuse can be eliminated. It's called requiring a warrant. What's tolerable doesn't matter: we don't need to litigate how willing we are to bend the fourth amendment.
If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)
https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-)
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
Personal space intrusion doesn't equal monitoring public roads.
Considering how ubiquitous public roads are it sorta does
And how impossible public roads are to avoid and live.
Requiring a warrant would be better than the status quo, but the very existence of the data is too high a risk, in my opinion.
The tool shouldn't exist, period.
That people defend this is shocking. Absolutely zero foresight.
If oligarchs can opt-out it shouldn't exist.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
Oligarchs can always opt out and they do opt out. It's almost the definition of having power: rules for thee but not for me.
surveillance technology is not going away. we need to mitigate the downsides
what systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
Anything can be made to go away.
Look at the rights of Us citizens when confronted by ICE.
Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable
They are being removed from hundreds of municipalities, what do you mean?
I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.
We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.
Surveillance tech very much can be and is going away in plenty of places
321 down, Dallas: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/6065838-dallas-police-...
150 down, El Paso: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/public-safe...
ALL on state roadways, Florida: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/09/01/whic...
A dozen agencies cancelling Flock in Wisconsin https://www.fox6now.com/news/flock-camera-pushback-fond-du-l...
A good question to ask is if those locations are just switching to an alternative ALPR system.
Human nature itself.
Why is it not going away?
not installing them. Voting out anyone that does
Video is useful in keeping people safe. Including from the cops. It’s about remaking the system to require court permission every time they access it, process and transparency.
Hmm, I wonder if, as a plaintiff that wished to file a complaint against a police department, would the records be gone by the time I got far enough through the courts to force evidence discovery. All of the Flock-lovers I talk to love to bring up the short-lived nature of the data (7 or 30 days depending on who you talk to).
This. I don't understand why something can only be used in the wrong way. Either
A. there is nothing a good person needs to hide (including cops, at least good ones), therefore it should be openly public to everyone and all usage logged and public (to catch abuse), or
B. privacy is important so it should be protected, and while data is collectible, nonetheless cannot be shared without consent or a court order. And none of this fake content that companies claim you gave by walking outside, setting up your phone/account/etc after buying it and being forced to sign so you didn't just buy an expensive brick, etc.
No big deal is it was just video. It's really about the data that can be extracted from the video such as who you meet, when you are home or not and who is at your house, etc. all in realtime.
Yes that should all require a court warrant based on probable cause.
Because that will never be abused.
Give me freedom or give me death.
Police wearing body cameras has nothing to do with universal mass surveillance devices.
You are conflating extremely different things, and that is dangerous.
Somehow we went from:
1. People can see and hear your in public
2. Therefore public places are not private
3. Therefore people can record you
4. Therefore it's okay to build a network of cameras that can track and query every place you have ever been
The problem has always been on step 2. The assumption that "public places are not private" anymore just because everyone can record you and post it on TikTok. In reality before smartphones public places were extremely private compared to being broadcast to the entire planet.
Not enough. Preemptively passing laws that forbid this kind of mass surveillance. Like in Switzerland and other nice places.
Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
Does that company also have three pounds of copper in their cameras, like Flock?
The fact that the victim is a Navy veteran should be immaterial here. People shouldn’t be any less upset if he wasn’t.
As a veteran I agree, with a significant caveat:
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
Should we also have separate posts for every individual case when camera helped catch someone? What's the point of continuously posting what amounts to single anecdotes without any statistical context? Should we ban every technology and shut down any government program that has small amount, but rage-bait-able form of, abuse?
Hopefully he gets a big enough payment that makes other jurisdictions remove these cameras.
Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.
My mental model:
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes. “Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
[1] https://acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-effect-not-a-diseas...
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/13/rest-peace-bip-city/?utm_s...
A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet. There is a lot of widely available evidence
> Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.
If only there was a more general way to find the lying sneaking power tripping police officers. Flock is turning out to be quite useful for society, in this one very specific way. Data to watch the watchmen.
Don't remove the cameras - make sure they're used legally and bad apples don't ruin a good thing:
Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.
https://kfdm.com/news/local/flock-camera-teamwork-credited-w...
https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/07/31/kidnapped-mother-son-...
https://www.whsv.com/2026/08/01/deputy-uses-flock-cameras-fi...
https://abc3340.com/news/local/moody-police-say-flock-camera...
Want to track latest on what flock cameras did? https://flockstopscrime.com
Why not the other way around? First make sure the police department is capable of using them legally and reliably investigating abuse, then we can consider allowing them.
Don't remove freedom from society - Be kind to people and give them equal opportunities to make sure they use their freedom for good. Prosecute bad apples with actual police work and don't let them ruin a good thing.
Want to track what people are doing all the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism#Treatment
Absolutely. First let's install an extreme surveillance state and give them full police power unlimited by the Constitution. Then, later, if we have any regrets, no problem. Just restore democracy.
But we decided as a country long long long ago that we wouldn't abet abuse, unwarranted search and seizure, and would treat people as innocent until proven guilty even if that meant elevated crime was the price to pay for that
"bad apples" = one rotten apple ruins the bunch.
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
Nice shitty astroturfing campaign, bro. How much does Flock provide in payola? Five figures and I'll start singing the praises, too, bro.